Sites which currently offer ''downloadable'' routes or tracks (as KML, GPX or similar files) could also offer a "view on-line" option, with the coordinates listed on a web page, marked-up with Geo (and hCard) microformats, which could then be parsed with whatever tool the user chooses.:

Sites which currently offer ''downloadable'' routes or tracks (as KML, GPX or similar files) could also offer a "view on-line" option, with the coordinates listed on a web page, marked-up with Geo (and hCard) microformats, which could then be parsed with whatever tool the user chooses.:

Advocacy

A lot can be done to help advocate the use of microformats. Often, simply by taking an existing site, and adding the suggested microformatting to a few of its pages as examples is all that is necessary to help the developers of the site add the microformats to the site itself. Applications, such as browsers, could also use some guidance on how to best support microformats.

Sometimes advocacy requires comparison and analysis of alternative technologies or approaches. As Mike Schinkel pointed out, we need good answers to comments like "No, we're going to use XYZ instead...".

The goal for this page is to include pointers for how to advocate microformats on new sites and on existing sites that are considering or using alternative approaches, as well as applications that can benefit from supporting microformats.

Adding Microformats to Existing Sites

Add sites here that you think would benefit from the addition of microformats. For now they are grouped by the microformat which would primarily benefit the site. Feel free to take a look at some of the sites on this list, document sample pages to be microformatted, add microformats to them, and then add the before/after of the key sections of mark-up to another wiki page for that site.

Successes are also noted; the most recent are flagged as Success!.

If your successes resulted from emails that you sent to site owners/developers, please consider sharing your successful advocacy emails on the advocacy-email-samples page, and along with each email sample, list the sites which responded positively to your email. This way others in the community can learn from your success and hopefully use your email samples to contact additional sites and get them to adopt microformats.

Television listings

A major coup would be to get one of the major players (the BBC, Sky, or PBS, say), to mark up their TV or radio listings with hCalendar - does anyone have contacts in such an organisation? Andy Mabbett 10:53, 21 Oct 2006 (PDT)

Does anyone have URLs to the TV or radio listings of the major players? Getting those URLs would be the next step, and then doing the markup ourselves would be the next step after that. Tantek 13:02, 21 Oct 2006 (PDT)

Concert/ Theatre Listings

Travel Industry

any travel site is based on calender type data!
Airlines, Hotels etc.
Sure it will be nice to get your reservation confirmation, but what about suppliers "syndicating" their product details that are calendar based? This would allow any other to mash-up supplier offerings.
Sorry no examples... but I hope this will stimulate others to add some if the know them or just to make others think about possibilities.

iCal Share

Event-sites

Sites that host online calendars of different sorts, containing information from many different areas. (These could also make use of hCard, since they often contain contact information to a lot of different places.)

Routes and tracks

Sites which currently offer downloadable routes or tracks (as KML, GPX or similar files) could also offer a "view on-line" option, with the coordinates listed on a web page, marked-up with Geo (and hCard) microformats, which could then be parsed with whatever tool the user chooses.:

VoteLinks

XFN

Identity links

Genealogy

Pending a full-blown genealogy microformat, sites can be encouraged to use the existing XFNrel values for family members: "parent", "child", "sibling", "spouse" (with, of course, hCard). So could genealogy tools which generate family-tree web pages.

Multiple microformats

The following site(s) could benefit greatly from having multiple microformats added to their pages:

IT News sites

There is obviously a great deal of publicity to be gained, by having microformats used on sites about IT developments, which are likely to be read by people in a position to have microformats used, and microformat tools implemented, in their organisations. Please add to this list!

Other high-profile IT sites

Are using hCard, but will not use hCalendar, saying: "There are aspects of hCalendar that we are not happy using in this situation [...] It surrounds the use of the abbr element, particularly surrounding times in a table cell (the schedule will be slotted into a table once it is ready)." 2007-01-20. Andy Mabbett

...

Science + Technology

Adding Microformats to Applications

User-agents (browsers, etc.) should support microformats natively. For instance, a user should not need to use a third party application or web service to add address details or events from a microformat-using web page to their address book or calendar program.

Browsers

In addition to the following, third-party developers should be encouraged to make their relevant browser add-ons microforamt aware; or to create new add-ons with microformat capabilities.

We've been looking into Microformats for a while, and we are in the process of rolling out Microformats support on My Opera and Dev Opera. Feel free to contact me with any additional suggestions of what you'd like to see. - David Storey

Screenreaders

Screenreaders (e.g Jaws) could recognise telephone number components of hCards, to differentiate them from other strings of digits. Andy Mabbett 13:02, 9 Dec 2006 (PST)

Additional to this, I believe that screen reader users would benefit from being able to recognise any of the microformats. For example, there is value in being verbally notified that a page contains "1 contact and 3 events", or being able to seek out rel attributes with help values. Frances Berriman

Publishing Platforms

Blogger

Drupal

MediaWiki

See above references to Wikipedia, which runs on MediaWiki (as does this wiki)

phpBB

I am attempting to find out how best to incorporate microformats into the posting system, now that the programmers have removed XHTML from the posting interface. I've posted wrt this topic in the official forum; no response as of right now. --Carla 17:08, 8 Sep 2007 (PDT)

I did discover, however, how to change the existing BBCode (the shortcuts that are programmed in and present when you install phpBB) for <bold> and <italic> to <strong> and <em>, which I will be doing now...so there's something, at least. :) --Carla 17:08, 8 Sep 2007 (PDT)

Rejections

hCalendar rejections

Response: "At the moment we have no plans to use hCalendar or hCard coding due to unresolved concerns about accessibility issues (especially text-to-speech readers), however, we thank you for your suggestion."

Request for clarification of concerns unanswered.

Geo rejections

"The true benefit of this appears to be allowing sharing between sites [this] is something that GC specifically guards against so would be a major detriment. And most importantly when discussing a site or piece of software that is running smoothly, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. There just does not seem to be a benefit to GC's current plans." 2007-04-02

Comparisons With Alternative Approaches

CalDAV

The CalDAV protocol should not be considered an 'alternative' approach as the two are not mutually exclusive. For more information, see: